Promoting Health Among Teens! (Comprehensive)

In the Promoting Health Among Teens! Comprehensive curriculum, students learn about puberty, sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), including HIV, and pregnancy prevention through a lively, interactive and student-centric curriculum, that includes talking circles, brainstorming, roleplays, DVDs, exercises and games that make learning enjoyable.

Overview

In the Promoting Health Among Teens! Comprehensive curriculum, students learn about puberty, sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), including HIV, and pregnancy prevention through a lively, interactive and student-centric curriculum, that includes talking circles, brainstorming, roleplays, DVDs, exercises and games that make learning enjoyable. This curriculum includes information about condom use as well as abstinence.

Description

The Promoting Health Among Teens! Comprehensive program consists of twelve 1-hour modules that teach youth about puberty, sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), including HIV, and pregnancy prevention. The information is serious and important, but presented in a way that students can learn together and enjoy themselves. Most activities are brief and can be completed in 10 to 15 minutes. Study participants stated that they had a good time, learned a lot and would recommend the program to their friends.

Learning activities include small-group discussions, videos, games, role-plays and homework assignments. Activities are designed to help teens get the skills they need to negotiate and practice abstinence and correct condom use if sexually active. These activities make teens aware of how choices about their sexual behavior can affect their health.

After participating in the curriculum, students will have:

Increased knowledge about prevention of HIV, STDs, and pregnancy.

More positive attitudes/beliefs about abstinence and condom use.

Increased confidence in their ability to negotiate abstinence.

Increased confidence in their ability to negotiate safer sex and to use condoms correctly.

Increased negotiation skills.

Improved condom-use skills.

Stronger intentions to abstain from sex, or use condoms if they have sex.

A lower incidence of HIV/STD risk-associated sexual behavior.

A stronger sense of pride and responsibility in making a difference in their lives.

The curriculum modules include:

Module 1: Getting to Know You and Steps to Making Your Dreams Come True

Module 2: Puberty and Adolescent Sexuality

Module 3: The Consequences of Sex: HIV Infection

Module 4: A Plan to Reduce the Consequences of Sex

Module 5: The Consequences of Sex: STD Infection

Module 6: The Consequences of Sex: Pregnancy

Module 7: STD/HIV Vulnerability

Module 8: Risky Sexual Behavior and Content Review

Module 9: Sexual Responsibility: Abstinence Skills

Module 10: Sexual Responsibility: Condom Use Skills

Module 11: Enhancing Sexual Responsibility Skills

Module 12: Role-Plays: Refusal and Negotiation Skills

Population Served & Setting

Promoting Health Among Teens! Comprehensive was designed to be used with small groups of adolescents in an urban area but can be adapted to be used with larger numbers of participants in rural areas as well. The curriculum can be implemented in various community settings, including schools or youth-serving agencies.

About the Authors

Loretta Sweet Jemmott, PhD, RN, FAAN, is one of the nation’s foremost researchers in the field of HIV/AIDS, STD and pregnancy prevention, with a consistent track record of developing evidence-based sexual risk-reduction interventions. As an expert in health promotion research, she has led the nation in understanding the psychological determinants for reducing risk-related behaviors and how best to facilitate and promote positive changes in health behaviors. Her research is devoted to designing and evaluating theory-driven, culturally competent sexual risk-reduction behavioral interventions with various populations across the globe.

An outstanding translational researcher, Dr. Jemmott’s work has had global impact and changed public policy. She has partnered with community-based organizations, including churches, clinics, barbershops and schools, and transformed her NIH-funded evidence-based research outcomes for use in real-world settings. She has presented her research to the U.S. Congress and at the NIH Consensus Development Conference on Interventions to Reduce HIV Risk Behaviors. Dr. Jemmott has received numerous awards for her significant contributions to the field of HIV/STD and pregnancy prevention research, including the U.S. Congressional Merit Award, Sigma Theta Tau National Honor Society’s Episteme Award and Hall of Fame Award, and election to membership in the Institute of Medicine, an honor accorded to very few nurses.

John B. Jemmott III, PhD, received his PhD in psychology from the Department of Psychology and Social Relations at Harvard University. He holds joint faculty appointments at the University of Pennsylvania as the Kenneth B. Clark Professor of Communication in the Annenberg School for Communication, and as Professor of Communication in Psychiatry in the Perelman School of Medicine. He is also the director of the Center for Health Behavior and Communication Research at the Annenberg School for Communication.

Dr. Jemmott is a Fellow of the Association of Psychological Science, the American Psychological Association and the Society for Behavioral Medicine. He has published more than 100 articles and book chapters, and has received numerous grants from the National Institutes of Health to conduct research designed to develop and test theory-based, contextually appropriate HIV/STD risk-reduction interventions for a variety of populations in the United States and sub-Saharan Africa.

Length of Program

The curriculum has 12 hours of content divided into twelve 1-hour modules.

Program Elements

Core intervention materials include:

Facilitator Curriculum

Activity Set (handouts, cards, posters)

Curriculum DVDs

Tanisha and Shay

The Hard Way

Nicole’s Choice

The Subject Is: HIV (Safer Sex Version)

The Subject Is: STDs (Safer Sex Version)

The Subject Is: Puberty (Comprehensive Version)

Wrap It Up & Condom Use Animation

Sample Student Workbook

The Promoting Health Among Teens! Comprehensive implementation set includes the facilitator's guide, activity set, a classroom set of 30 student workbooks and 7 DVDs. The curriculum requires the use of a monitor with DVD capabilities.

Student workbooks are recommended for every student. Additional workbook sets of 5 and 30 are available.

An optional LGBTQ Supplement is also available from ETR. It includes a lesson that can be taught before implementing the intervention as well as suggestions for acceptable adaptations to make evidence-based programs more inclusive of LGBTQ youth.

Staffing Requirements

This curriculum is designed to be taught by classroom teachers or family life educators. Educators interested in implementing this program should be skilled in using interactive teaching methods and guiding group discussions, and should be comfortable with the program content.

Parent/Guardian Notification

It is essential to inform parents and guardians regarding the nature and scheduling of this or any sexual health education program. Prior to implementation of the curriculum, families should receive written notice describing the goals of Promoting Health Among Teens! Comprehensive and the nature of the content to be covered. Parents also should be given an opportunity to view the curriculum and related materials if they wish. The vast majority of parents want their children to receive appropriate instruction and be given the information and skills they need to protect their sexual health, but parents/guardians also must be allowed the chance to opt out or exclude their children from participating in the program, if they wish.

Logic Model

Evidence Summary

Research Design

In the original study, a randomized control trial was conducted to test the effects of the intervention. In the research study, African-American students in grades 6 and 7 were randomly assigned to an 8-hour abstinence-only intervention, an 8-hour safer-sex–only intervention, an 8- or 12-hour combined abstinence and safer-sex intervention, or an 8-hour health-promotion control group. The programs were facilitated by minority facilitators—one was Puerto Rican and all others were African American.

Findings

The participants who participated in the Promoting Health Among Teens! Comprehensiveintervention reported:

A reduction in the incidence of multiple sexual partners compared with the health control group.

A significant reduction in the incidence of recent sexual intercourse at the 24-month follow-up.

The Promoting Health Among Teens! Comprehensive intervention was especially effective with sexually experienced adolescents. For example, among participants who were sexually experienced at baseline, those in the 12-hour combined abstinence and safer-sex intervention reported less sexual intercourse in the previous 3 months at the 6-, 12-, 18- and 24-month follow-up than the control group. In addition, they reported less unprotected sex at all five follow-up sessions than the control group.

The adolescents who received the Promoting Health Among Teens! Comprehensive intervention also scored higher in condom use knowledge; believed more strongly that condoms can prevent pregnancy, STDs and HIV; believed more strongly that using condoms will not interfere with sexual enjoyment; expressed greater confidence that they could have condoms available when they needed them; and reported greater confidence that they could exercise sufficient impulse control to use condoms and greater self-efficacy for using condoms than did those in the control group.

Adaptation Guidance

ETR is a leader in developing adaptation guidelines to enable professionals to adapt evidence-based intervention programs for implementation in underserved communities, while maintaining fidelity to the intervention's core components. ETR works with program developers to ensure that these tools are of the highest quality and meet the different needs of the field and end users, e.g., teachers, trainers, program mangers/staff, research teams, and funders.

Fidelity Log

Pre/Post Tests

Classroom teachers can use pre/post tests to examine whether short-term knowledge learning objectives have been met. A simple pretest-posttest assessment design can be used to measure pre-instruction levels and post-instruction changes in student learning. The sample pre-test provided here is from the research study and gathers demographic data on participants in addition to assessing attitudes and sexual health knowledge.

Your ability to detect student change using this survey may vary and can be affected by numerous factors (e.g., number and content of lessons students receive, student scores at pretest, student motivation and interest in topic and survey, etc.) Improvement between pretest and posttest can be viewed as supportive, but not definitive, evidence of the curriculum's impact on short-term knowledge learning objectives. A well-designed evaluation study (e.g., using a strong experimental design with a well-matched comparison group and adequate sample size) with more extensive measurement would be needed to provide stronger evidence of curriculum impact.

Training & TA

For over 30 years, ETR has been building the capacity of community-based organizations, schools, school districts, and state, county and local agencies in all 50 states and 7 U.S. territories to implement and replicate evidenced-based programs (EBPs) to prevent teen pregnancy, STD/STI and HIV. Our nationally recognized training and research teams work in partnership with clients to customize training and technical assistance (TA) to address the needs of their agencies and funding requirements.

Training

Educators interested in implementing Promoting Health Among Teens! Comprehensive should be skilled in using interactive teaching methods and guiding group discussions. It is highly recommended that educators who plan to teach Promoting Health Among Teens! Comprehensive receive research-based professional development to prepare them to effectively implement and replicate the curriculum with fidelity for the intended target group.

Training on Promoting Health Among Teens! Comprehensive is available through ETR's Professional Learning Services.

Technical assistance (TA), coaching and ongoing support

ETR provides in-person and web- or phone-based technical assistance before, during and/or after program implementation. TA is tailored to the needs of the site and is designed to support quality assurance, trouble-shoot adaptation issues, and boost implementation.

Enrichment Training

To support a holistic approach to teen pregnancy and HIV prevention programs, ETR offers a number of additional training and technical assistance opportunities, including content-specific workshops, skill-based trainings, organizational development consultation and much more. To learn more about these opportunities, visit our Training & TA pages >>

Adaptation

Adaptation support materials, training and/or TA are available to assist educators in meeting the needs of individual communities by implementing EBPs effectively and consistently with core components. All adaptation support is based on ETR's groundbreaking, widely disseminated adaptation guidelines and kits for effective adaptations.

Training

Information

Interested in Our Training Services?

Condom Demo Kit

Features everything health educators need to demonstrate how to use a condom, including a wooden penis model and 75 premium condoms, the award-winning Condom Use DVD, 50 award-winning Condoms: Hot Tips pocket guides, 50 Condom Facts pamphlets, and a convenient, durable carrying case.
Available in English or Spanish.